Come make your own healing elixir for what ails you or your deepest heart's desire with local beloved Witch, Dori Midnight. Dori will lead us through a little visualization to get focused on exactly what is called for, then choose from many flower and gem elixirs such as: Love Potion, Sweetness and Light, Fairy Magic, and more to create your own personalized blend. Each potion maker will get to take home a 1 ounce bottle of potion, which you can drop on your tongue with delight!

Open to witches and magiciennes of all ages.

Please RSVP by Feb 2nd.

$20-$30 sliding scale

Herbal House Party - Valentine's Love Potions

Saturday, February 6th, 5-7pm

I will be bringing my Charmed Honey and other elixirs to this delicious event, hosted by the amazing Atava Garcia Sweicicki ofAncestral Apothecary

Hosted by Marie Kyoko Morohoshi at her home in Bernal HeightsPlease RSVP to atava@ancestralapothecary.comYou are invited to a playful and sensual evening exploring the world of botanica erotica.Learn about how to use herbs to boost your health, vitality and libido.There will be a presentation on herbal medicine with a focus on herbal aphrodisiacs.We'll taste herbal elixirs made with herbs like damiana, vanilla, cardamom, chocolate and rose and talk about how to use them to spice up your love life.Herbal recipies will be presented and we'll also demonstrate how to make some of your own botanica erotica products.Lecture and discussion led by local grass-roots herbalist, Atava Garcia Swiecicki.Atava has been studying herbal medicine for 20 years and loves to turn people on the amazing world of medicinal plants.Atava teaches herbalism, sees clients in her private practice and runs her small herbal business, Ancestral Apothecary, in Oakland .Ancestral Apothecary products will be on sale at this event.Products include Power Mushrooms Extracts, Elderberry Cordial, Damiana Cordial, Siete Flores, and some few special sexy Valentines gifts.

equinox Open House

Saturday, March 20th, 1-5pm

My door will be open for the day and you can come and have some rose tea with me at my kitchen table and say our farewells for nows. Visit with Rainbow and Pagu and take home something magical. I will have all kinds of herbal treats and treasures for give away and for sale, like teas, bath salts, elixirs, Boundaries in a Bottle and other trinkets as well.

About my move:

Most of my family heritage is tough and tiny Eastern Europeans- romanian, latvian, ukrainian, and roma gypsy. Throw in a little Cherokee and Spanish and now you understand why I am so short. My great grandma told me we've got wandering blood and yet still I crave a home, a garden, some roots. I've lived in San Francisco for over 13 years (except for a 10 month stint in Bisbee, AZ in an old bordello in the canyon and in Barcelona for a year, during my Saturn Returns) and SF feels like home- mostly. There is a big part of me, deep in my heart, that keeps being called to live on some land, out of the city. I want to walk out my door and into the woods. I want to harvest mushrooms and lichen and herbs and get to know trees in a daily way- trees that have been there for hundreds of years. I want to sleep where it's dark (my sleeping accessories are becoming ridiculous at this point to emulate dark and quiet- I'd be embarrassed for you to see me.)

And so, it is time for me to step out into the unknown and cart my apothecary and magic across the country to live in Western Massachusetts, in the hills outside Northampton. I will be writing (I've got books up my sleeve!), teaching, getting to know new plantitas, and expanding my witch queendom throughout the land. This will be a trial year- I'll see how my thin California blood can weather the weather and if I miss the foggy pink and gay city too much...or maybe this will be the beginning of the Dori Midnight Magical Arts Camp/Healing Retreat Center/Fairy Land/ Rewilding Village/Beekeeping Farm, which you of course will be welcome at. Only the goddess knows.

I will be somewhat bi-coastal this year, visiting SF in the late Fall and Spring for a chunk of time to do sessions with people and maybe a ritual.

Beginning in May, I will be available for phone consultations, which even though you don't get tea and cookies in my sweet smelling office and lay down on the satiny table and have Pagu lay on your heart, I will be doing distance healing, which I must say, is just as potent.

In fact, here are two testimonials from people who I have done phone sessions/distance healing with:

Twice I have had the pleasure of receiving a distance healing from Dori Midnight. The first began with a talk over the phone, the second over email. After a check in, she then sets aside a time to do her thing, journeying into the wise of the spirit, facilitating radiant healing, to where it is called.

I have experienced from these sessions: movement of blocked energy that seemed to be gently reminded of my highest good, wise and helpful insight strengthened by Dori's years/life times of practice, practical and totally magical self care suggestions, spiritual guidance that puts me in touch with my own self healing/higher self AND positive change on many levels including past, present, emotional, energetic, spiritual, etc. I am grateful for her consistency, and constantly loving work and would recommend a distance healing to any one.

And words from someone who has monthly phone sessions for the past year and a half:

My first session with Dori was in person - each subsequent session has been via phone calls. Initially, I wondered if sessions by phone would be helpful... 1.5 years later it's clear to me that Dori's abilities operate independently of our physical proximity. I just ramble away (in linear and circular fashion) and then Dori does her thing. She reflects and re-frames in ways that have supported me in moving through crisis to a really sweet place in life! Her skill working with silence on the phone is also particularly appreciated. When we talk she is present with me. Our connection is loving, clear, useful and quite powerful. I've searched for many years to find my path to do this healing work. I'm super happy that geography isn't a barrier to such a good thing!

See! Magic works!

I will be available for phone sessions beginning in May. We'll talk for 45 minutes, I'll do some distance healing, then we'll have a 15 minute check in sometime in the following week. I am offering these initial phone consults for a special intro of $65-$85, sliding scale.

My last day of work in my office in San Francisco (for now) will be March 16th. If you'd like to see me before I go, please contact me! And if you know people on the east coast, please pass along my name- I will be teaching and doing healing work as soon as my enchanted forest den is ready to receive people.

Both scary and exciting, I can't fight the river, so I just have to trust that it is taking me where I need to go next.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Amaranta and Malcolm, two graduates of Magical Arts, teach the younger students about the magic of Fennel- a beautiful and very useful plant that grows all over wild near parking lots and abandoned hillsides by the school. A tea of fennel will really help when you are a wee bit gassy.

After our herb walk, I did a class on Crystal Magic. I brought in all my most magical stones and introduced the kinder- 4th graders to Lapis, Amethyst, Malachite, Rose Quartz, and more. I led the class on a guided journey inside the stone to meet the spirit and ask for it's story or any healing it wanted to share. Here are some of the tales:

Diego, 10 yrs old, with Labradorite: "His real name is Luma. He is of the stars. He fills you with starlights and gives you magic."

Ruby, 7 yrs old, with Rose Quartz: "She told me a story how one day there was a clear crystal and it fell in love with a rose. They loved each other and wanted to be with each other forever and so they became this stone. It is for love. It is for your heart."

Lorelei, 7 yrs old, with Obsidian: "This stone took me on a ride through a volcano, into the earth to show me where he or she or whatever where they came from. I saw all the way into the past and under everything. Then it rolled me back into my heart."

Lucy, 9 yrs old, with Smoky Quartz: "This stone protects you. It helps you when you feel afraid and afraid to be alone. It is a friend and helps you help the earth heal."

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Tonight the moon will eclipse and the Sabian Symbol for the moment (11:11pm here on the west coast) is "Radiant sprite dances upon the mist of a waterfall (each degree of the wheel has a symbol channeled by a person in 1925. weird and amazing. here is more.)

I am absolutely staying up past my bedtime (a very reasonable one for a grandma) to go out and make an essence in the garden tonight and bathe all my special rocks in this dark moon.

This moon seems to be about remembering the spritely selves we carry in our bodies which are often subdued by city living and work and getting older and eating crappy food and it reminds us to remember to see the invisible.

The kids I teach often ask me if I've ever seen real fairies and as their teacher, ie authority figure, I have to model good magical things, so I reply, "Of course, all the time." The truth is that while I have had a multiple experiences as an adult with nature spirits (another story), they don't look like glitter-y lithe pointy ear-ed teenage ravers with wings at all.

This is much like when my students ask when they will learn to ride broomsticks in my class, to which I say, "Graduate School, " which actually IS true, because by then, if they have retained any shred of what I have taught them, they will know that they can fly if they keep practicing.

This is a tricky thing- the importance of feeding the imagination with fairy tales and magic stories that open one's mind to new possibilities (even things like harry potter which I personally can't stand, but here is why starhawk loves it)... but then it's essential to release one's expectations about what it will be like based on what other people said. We are so dependent on the media and our easy access to knowing and seeing everything in a second, we forget what it's like to wonder or not know or figure something out yourself. I have one student who told me last week that she actually saw the tooth fairy this time when she put her tooth under her pillow. Guess what? She said she looked exactly like ME! I can't believe the tooth fairy has a big ol' gap tooth- you'd think she have better access to orthodontia.

Tonight under the dark moon, I will also do some earth acupuncture that I learned this summer and send it to Haiti. Here's how you do it, if you too want to send some healing to the people of Haiti: find a good spot on the ground (this involves dowsing, but you can also just feel what spot feels right, like a power point) and slide a special twig, stick, needle, or rock into the spot. I am going to drop some Crisis essences onto the stick and ask the healing to travel along the earth's meridians to Haiti. While this is a natural disaster, it's clear that the devastation is totally exacerbated by the United States' unjust policies that continue to impoverish and disenfranchise the Haitian people.

Tonight I send my prayers out to the dark moon, to the eclipse, which carries the energy of releasing and renewing. May all the beings in Haiti- the babies, grandmas and grandpas, beloved pets, children, travelers, their relatives all over the world , and the workers of good find safety and healing. May they all have clean water to drink, nourishing food to warm and comfort them, and may they have all the medical care and support they need to grieve, to heal and to restore their homes.